John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

Darth Maul cooks Christmas dinner for the whole family

The Space channel is airing this promo for a Star Wars marathon, tied into a promotion called the 12 Days of Spacemas. The title doesn't matter much, though, when you see Darth Maul fret over his kitchen, and Vader and the other unhappy Christmas guests at the table. (Best touch: a stormtrooper with a napkin.)

Movie poster makeovers

Movie buffs love picking apart the variations between an original film and a remake; design buffs turn their eyes to other things, like the posters. Six Revisions, a design blog I follow, compared a slew of posters used to sell different versions of films, including Scarface, above.

Monkey business: How a balloon game can pop away a day

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, Nov. 26, 2009. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

I’ve been trying to clear a few hurdles with my work this last week, but have been falling prey to a little vice that’s hard to resist. I can keep my hands off the cookies, can resist the call of a trashy TV show, but have had a hard time ignoring a bunch of little monkeys with darts, bombs and glue-guns.

Bloons Tower Defense 4
“Bloons” is a well-established franchise on the web, at least among cheap (i.e., free) and easy-to-play games. This is the fourth iteration in the series, and it’s pretty sophisticated. If you’re new to tower defence games, they follow a pattern: you establish towers, or weapons, along a route to defeat some kind of invaders. In this case, the invaders are balloons – hence the title – and your weapons involve monkeys. And darts, bombs, planes, glue, tacks and all kinds of other fun stuff. This series is more complicated and varied, with more patterns, skill levels and upgrades.

And, as I said, it can become a major drain on your time. I think I’ve invested (I can’t bring myself to say “wasted”) a few hours over the run of the last week or so. Because the games can run on for dozens and dozens of turns, I recommend registering (it’s free) so you can save a game for later resumption.

A final point: I was loading Bloons the other evening when my son took notice. “I didn’t know you knew this game,” he exclaimed, evidently unaware that grown-ups can definitely compete with the kids for mindless online fun. I don’t know whether my stock had risen with my son, or my credibility as an adult had sunk. I didn’t worry about it, and got on with my game.

Elsewhere this week

Santa parade
The Downtown Santa Parade in St. John’s is this Sunday; click here for route and bus information, photos and more. A suggestion for the sponsors: let parade users post their own pics to the galleries, or create and then link to a feed at a service like Flickr.

Starbucks Drinks Simplified (Kinda)
Ever been dazzled or confused while overhearing the sometimes-complicated drink orders at a Starbucks? This unofficial page collects the many, many drinks you can apparently order from a barista. (Good luck getting a ristretto, evidently.)

50 Most Important Recordings
Year-end lists are one thing, but we’ve already been seeing a lot of decade-recapping lists, of movies, cultural points, etc. In its review of music in the Oughts (it says something about a decade when people don’t even agree on what to call it), NPR opted not to list the best, but the most influential. How else could you explain the inclusion of both Arcade Fire and Britney Spears?



Best commercials
In a similar vein: From AdWeek, an interactive feature on some of the best television advertising – that is, the ones not created to appear on Super Bowl broadcasts. Some very clever work here; my vote went on Cadbury’s fascinating ‘Gorilla’ spot, featuring a gorilla drumming along to Phil Collins. This is just feature among many; click on the banner to go to an index to explore other materials.



Aldous Huxley vs. George Orwell
Here’s a thought-provoking illustration about the dystopic visions of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with a compare-and-contrast text borrowed from media critic Neil Postman’s still-relevant 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman, who died six years ago, published the book long before many of the technologies depicted in the pictures shown here even existed, but his message is as clear as ever.



Star Wars status updates
From College Humor, a set of five faux Facebook status updates, with comments from various characters in the Star Wars universe. See why Obi-Wan Kenobi, for instance, jumped in with a rapid comment when Luke Skywalker got stoked with romantic thoughts about Princess Leia, or how a stormtrooper had remorse after a battle with the Ewoks.

John Gushue is a writer in St. John's, and is currently on leave from his job with CBC News in St. John's. John is on Twitter right here.

When Ralphie, the Christmas Story kid, sold chocolate milk

We kicked off the Christmas season at our house with a command performance of A Christmas Story, which never fails to get a smile. (I've been a fan since the late 1980s, when the late Art Rockwood all but insisted I buy a copy.) I was curious to learn that Peter Billingsley, who played the BB-gun-loving Ralphie, had appeared as Messy Marvin, the kid in the Hershey's chocolate syrup commercials of the early 1980s. A collection are below. Billingsley, incidentally, is flourishing, albeit behind the camera. He directed this year's Couples Retreat, and was one of the producers of Iron Man, among other movies.

Here are three more, unfortunately with subpar sound:

Boy, they don't make ads like this very often

... and for a reason. I learned about this via the Age of Persuasion Facebook feed. 

Lost: The poster

Eric Tan is a California artist who does incredible posters, and often just for his own purposes. (He works for Disney, though.) Above is a poster he did for Lost, the TV show; many of the items on his blog relate to movies. He doesn't post often, but much of what you'll see are gems.

After nearly a decade, I still get a chuckle from the pets.com sock puppet

Pets.com went big with an advertising campaign in early 2000, buying Super Bowl airtime as if to prove its business model (delivering pet supplies to the home) was sound. The company launched an IPO just before the dot-com bubble of the day burst; it was all over before 2000 was out. A subsequent book revealed that pets.com spent 20 times more on advertising than it earned in revenue that year. 

But the ads, concocted by heavyweights TBWA\Chiat\Day, did at least get people talking, and were pretty entertaining. Here's a refresher. 

Odd Job: Celebrity endorser

Odd Job remains one of the great villains in the James Bond canon ... but did you know the character lent his brute force and peculiar charm to cough suppressant commercials, too? Here's a gem from 1968.

Five-fact Friday

Back-to-school sales have reignited the advertising wars for computers. Apple has been continuing its "I'm a Mac" campaign, which is credited with rapidly increasing the Mac share of the market. Last year, Apple outspent Microsoft's TV advertising by 71 per cent; in the first half of this year, however, Microsoft has more than doubled Apple's spending on commercials, in an attempt to win back customers.

Ted Kennedy grew up in the shadow of older brothers who seemed far more destined than he to gain the public spotlight; he also grew up on the move, attending 10 different schools by the time he was 11 years of age. 

If the 2010 Ikea catalogue looks a little bit different, look closely at the flag on the front cover. For the first time in a half-century, the Swedish manufacturer of build-your-own furniture has stopped using a stylized and very familiar type of Futura as its font. Instead, it has customized Verdana, which font geeks like myself know was invented for use on the web. Why? Verdana can be adapted to other alphabets, and Ikea wanted a consistent look online and in print, all over the world.

Duncan Jones, who is earning acclaim for his new, 2001-inflected film Moon, was better known decades ago by another name: Zowie Bowie, one of a series of oddball names rock stars gave to their children. The son of David Bowie, he went by Zowie until he was 12, when he changed his first name to Joey, and later Joe. As an adult, he's been known as Duncan Jones - the surname matching David Bowie's original name, David Jones. 

Speaking of unusual names, there's evidence that having one raises the odds you'll wind up in trouble with the law. Check out a Freakonomics posting on that here. 

Five-fact Friday

Five not terribly important things that you may not have known yesterday. Here we go: 

Avon originally was founded to sell books, not cosmetics. Founder David McConnell used perfume only as an incentive to help sell books.

Easter will be celebrated on the same day in 2010 in both the western Christian churches and in the Eastern Orthodox church. Because the churches use different methods to calculate when Easter falls, coinciding dates happen only a few times every century. (Easter will be on April 4, by the way.)

Chindu Sreedharan, 36, a lecturer at the Media School in Bournemouth University, England, has undertaken an ambitious project with his Twitter account. Through @Epicretold, he is tweeting, in segments of up to 140 characters, the contents of the world's largest poem, the Mahabharata.

Genius of Love by Tom Tom Club - the side project founded by husband-and-wife Talking Heads Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth - features a famous and much-sampled bassline ... but Weymouth didn't actually play it. Round-the-clock recording (they could afford only three days of studio time) left Weymouth unable to close her hand at one point, forcing her to teach the basslines to a technician. You can play the video below.

Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino mogul, has a surname that fits the gambling business, and by no accident. His father, a compulsive gambler who owned bingo halls, changed the family's name from Weinberg to a new identity. That detail is included in a recent 60 Minutes profile; click below to watch it.

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